Samsung Series 9 NP900X3D - Screen, Keyboard and Touchpad

Summary

Our Score:

8

Samsung Series 9 NP900X3D – Screen Quality

The Samsung Series 9 laptop was never meant to be about gaming, and that’s re-stated in the kind of screen used. It has a matt finish, which is relentlessly practical for outdoors use, being all-but immune to screen reflections.

Glossy finishes are used in most laptops to give a more vibrant-looking image, but the Series 9’s screen is high-quality enough to negate the ‘dull’ preconceptions of matt screens. Colours are bold, viewing angles are excellent for a laptop and top brightness is great – looking at a white screen with the backlight maxed-out is uncomfortable. Samsung rates the screen at 400 nits – the average for a laptop sits around 250 nits.

As well as manual control over the Samsung Series 9 NP900X3D’s
screen brightness, there’s an auto mode that uses an ambient light
sensor in the screen surround to judge how bright the screen needs to
be. We recommend using this mode, as it works well, and it's particularly useful considering Windows' defaults will leave the screen at brighter levels than is necessary.

Its resolution is nothing to get excited about, though. The Samsung Series 9 NP900X3D has a 1,600 x 900 pixel screen, which is a way off the 1,920 x 1,080 of Full HD, which is becoming more common in laptops. And the up-front look of the matt display does highlight this, making pixels easy to discern in text - especially when browsing the web.

However, only those who are used to the supremely sharp text of the latest high-end tablets are likely to notice immediately, and for the price it's unreasonable to expect more.

Samsung Series 9 NP900X3D – Heat and Noise

Although using an SSD means that the Samsung Series 9 NP900X3D doesn’t have masses of storage – just 128GB – it helps to decrease noise. There are no spinning platters with solid state drives.

The lack of optical drive has the same effect – no spinning discs means less noise in operation, even if the nostalgic among you may miss a DVD drive.

When strained, it’s the right edge of the laptop that’s gets warmest, suggesting this is where some of the hottest-running components live. Samsung seems to have designed the laptop so that heat is spread across the top and bottom, helping to avoid the knee-scorching effect that afflicts some portable laptops when under strain.

Using power-efficient components has a positive impact on heat as well as noise, and we found the laptop didn’t get any hotter than ‘warm’ in normal mid-level use. This also means the fan rarely has to rev its engines. Most of the time the Series 9 is near-silent.

Samsung Series 9 NP900X3D – Keyboard

With a high-contrast black-on-silver Chiclet design, the Samsung Series 9 NP900X3D keyboard is a dead ringer for the Apple MacBook’s design. And it looks great.

It's not just a looker, either. Its keys are well-spaced and have a firm, consistent action, and the layout is simple and intuitive. The one drawback, which affects almost all slim and light keyboards, is that the keys’ movement is a little shallow.

As we would expect from a high-end laptop like this, the Samsung Series 9 NP900X3D has a keyboard backlight that turns on automatically when needed, using the light sensor that sits above the screen. The backlight has a pleasant, soft green hue that lights-up both the lettering and the key’s edges.

Samsung Series 9 NP900X3D – Touchpad

The laptop’s touchpad is a similar success. It’s topped with textured glass, which offers a silky smooth finish with just the right level of resistance.

Like most style-focused laptops, the touchpad’s buttons are built into the pad itself, and most of the pad is ‘clickable’. There’s roughly a 15mm expanse at the top that is non-clicky, and there’s a tiny dead zone in-between the zones for the two buttons – small enough that you probably won’t notice.

Jedibeeftrix

June 2, 2013, 3:20 pm

"itting a discrete graphics chip into a shell this small without the whole laptop melting under use would be tricky, but be aware that the integrated Intel HD 4000 can only handle older games or less demanding newer ones at lower settings."

The HD4000 is found on ivy-bridge chips, this is a sandy-bridge chip with HD3000 graphics.

Tsais

July 3, 2013, 10:51 pm

I was gonna say, this reviewer is confused about Intel's Processors...

Not only that, he must also be half blind, thinking that this looks like a Macbook Air... if he said that about an Asus Zenbook, I'd say alright, close enough... but this? pffft... He fails to recognize that this design has its own unique way of being cool.

Better to get a deal on its predecessor, the 900X3C, which has a better (newer) Ivy Bridge processor and a few other small details that are better, cause the 'D' model was made by Samsung to be the stripped down affordable version.

The lack of an (always glossy) touchscreen is very welcome to me. I find vertical touch screens on laptops useless. They don't even have proper digitizers with pressure sensitivity for creative uses with a stylus. Any old school user will find them a glary waste of time, weight and money, unless they can be folded to rest horizontally.

andyd

August 25, 2013, 5:10 pm

Briefly wanted to talk about the dead zones on the Samsung touchpads. I'm using one right now a cheaper Win 7 laptop Series 3 NP300E5A-A02UB and over on the entire left portion of the touchpad seems to losing sensitivity. When I try and move the mouse cursor or tap it to open a link on webpages it doesn't do so on first motion. Its been about a year since buying the laptop and already the cheaper materials are breaking down? I had another Samsung last year which lasted about 15 months before the touchpad stopped responding. Rather annoying knowing Samsung is using cheaper materials even though they are lower end models.

Guest

October 20, 2013, 8:20 pm

So does the 900x3c lack anything (e.g. a non-glassy screen)? The ATIV 9 I was looking at did not have a touch screen. Do you know what model that is?

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